However, no matter what i tried, i couldn’t get office web apps to work quite right. It wanted to launch in the window, but it would get stuck there for 5 minutes then tell me the office webapp service was busy or this dandy error:

Word Document: “Sorry, Word Web App can’t open this document because the service is busy. Please try again later.”

Word Document : “Sorry, there was a problem and we can’t open this document. If this happens again, try opening the document in Microsoft Word.”

I scoured the internet and nothing. Then it dawns on me. I had demoted this server from being a Domain Controller. Somewhere in the instructions i had read that OWA server cannot be a domain controller. But it doesn’t say it should have NEVER been one either.

I went ahead and installed a fresh copy of Windows Server 2012 with all the updates.

and it STILL DID NOT WORK CORRECTLY. Hmmmm…
Turns out that SharePoint remembers all your SPWPIzones from before. So if you wan’t external access you need to run this command to make sure you know what zone you are in:

Get-SPWOPIZone

Then make sure you set your spopizone to external by running this command:

Set-SPWOPIZone –zone “external-https”

Now it works.
Moral of the story, don’t reuse domain controllers, even if you have demoted them. They will always be bitter you demoted them.